About Catherine Marshall

She was a pastor’s wife at twenty-two, a widow at thirty-four, and best-selling author at forty. The little girl who grew up in a Presbyterian manse in Keyser, West Virginia, found herself the day after her wedding to the most sought-after bachelor in all of Georgia thrust into the heady atmosphere of Washington, D.C. during the Roosevelt New Deal era. The capital was bursting with the “best and the brightest’ as the nation fought back from the Great Depression even as it was being drawn inexorably into world war for a second time in two decades.

Silent Partner

Peter Marshall’s partner in ministry was twelve years his junior, a studious history major at Agnes Scott College who was captivated by the strong, attractive, unattainable man whom she adored from afar—until suddenly he noticed her. The shy young girl who had once envisioned a writing career set it all aside to create a home for her husband and later their son Peter John. Sarah Catherine Wood Marshall (1914-1983) tried to do it all. And then tuberculosis struck. This was her dark night of the soul. But her three years of confinement to bed were not wasted time. She quietly collaborated with Peter on his sermons by contributing research, sharing stories, and drafting his reading text.

“A Man Called Peter” – the Book and the Film

When Peter Marshall died of a heart attack in January 1949, Catherine’s world caved in. Only recently recovered from serious illness, she was a particularly ill-equipped widow.  She had no job training, had married right out of college, and had a nine-year old son, Peter John, to support. To outsiders her prospects were bleak.  However, she felt they had reckoned without God. Having absorbed the lessons of her husband’s preaching and her own sick-bed encounter with God, Catherine simply refused to be destitute. And so she set to work editing a volume of Peter’s sermons. The wildly successful Mr. Jones, Meet the Master led to writing A Man Called Peter, the biography of her husband that stayed on the New York Times bestseller list for an astounding fifty consecutive weeks. Through A Man Called Peter, she extended Peter Marshall’s ministry, making his virile faith believable for millions of readers. Then Hollywood came calling. Twentieth Century Fox's movie version of A Man Called Peter, starring Richard Todd and Jean Peters, became its biggest box-office hit of 1955.  Men entered the ministry because of the film that changed the lives of a generation of teenagers drawn to Dr. Marshall’s charismatic preaching.

On Her Own

Catherine Marshall chronicled her own journey in To Live Again and continued to write, encouraged by her husband, Guideposts editor Leonard LeSourd, whom she married ten years after Peter’s death. Not since C.S. Lewis has a contemporary Christian writer captured such a wide public readership. Her first novel Christy, inspired by her mother’s experiences teaching the impoverished children in Appalachian Tennessee, became a popular CBS television series. God had brought to fruition her childhood dream of being a writer. Books written or edited by Catherine Marshall have sold over eighteen million copies in thirty-five languages. “All things,” indeed,” have worked together for good.”